Fred W. Friendly

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Fred W. Friendly

Fred W. Friendly (October 30, 1915 – March 3, 1998) was the former president of CBS News and the creator, with Edward R. Murrow, of the documentary television program See It Now.

Friendly was born Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer to a Jewish family in New York City. A graduate of Nichols Business College, Friendly entered radio in the 1930s at a radio station in Providence, RI. By the 1940s he was an experienced radio producer. It was in this role that Friendly (who changed his name during his Providence days) first worked with Murrow on the Columbia Records historical albums, I Can Hear It Now.

The first entry in the series, released on Thanksgiving Day 1948, covered the crisis/war years 1933–1945. It was a groundbreaker in that it used actual clips of radio news coverage and speeches of the major events during that 12-year time span. Friendly came up with the idea after noticing the then-new use of audiotape in regular radio news coverage, as opposed to wire or disc recordings.

Although Murrow was an established CBS name and Columbia Records was then owned by CBS, Friendly's next full-time work came as a news producer at NBC. It was there that Friendly came up with the idea for the news-oriented quiz show Who Said That?, hosted by NBC newsman Robert Trout. Friendly later wrote, directed and produced the summer 1950 NBC Radio series The Quick and the Dead, about the development of the atomic bomb, which featured Trout, Bob Hope and New York Times writer Bill Laurence, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Manhattan Project).

After the success of The Quick and the Dead, Friendly was recruited to work full-time for CBS by news executive Sig Mickelson. That fall, Murrow and Friendly teamed to produce a CBS Radio documentary series inspired by their record albums — a weekly show called Hear It Now and hosted by Murrow. The show moved to TV as See It Now on Sunday, November 18, 1951.

Murrow and Friendly broadcast a revealing See It Now documentary analysis on Senator Joseph McCarthy (airing March 9, 1954) which has been credited with changing the public view of McCarthy, and being a key event in McCarthy's fall from power. It was an extension of the duo's continuing probe of the fight between McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade and individual rights.

Murrow and Friendly had done a notable See It Now episode on the topic the previous fall, when the show probed the case of Air Force Reserve Lieutenant Milo Radulovich, who had lost his security clearance because of the supposed leftist leanings of his sister and father — evidence the Air Force kept sealed. Five weeks later, Radulovich was reinstated by the secretary of the Air Force.

After See It Now ended in summer 1958, Murrow and Friendly worked together on its successor, CBS Reports, though Friendly alone was executive producer and Murrow no more than an occasional reporter/narrator. Their most famous CBS Reports installment — the probe of migrant farm workers "Harvest of Shame" — aired in November 1960 and is still considered one of TV's finest single programs.

Friendly continued to oversee several notable CBS Reports documentaries after Murrow's 1961 departure from the network, including "Who Speaks for Birmingham?," "Birth Control and the Law" and "The Business of Heroin."

In 1966 he resigned from CBS when the network ran a scheduled episode of I Love Lucy instead of the first United States Senate hearings questioning American involvement in Vietnam. Former CBS News President Richard Salant, writing in his memoirs, said that Friendly's problem was compounded by the fact he could not make such a request directly to the top CBS management (William S. Paley and Frank Stanton), as previous CBS News presidents had. In this case, Friendly had to go through a new executive level, in this case CBS Broadcast Group President Jack Schneider.

After he left CBS Friendly worked at the Ford Foundation and also created the Media and Society Friendly Seminars, which were renamed the Fred Friendly Seminars after his death. According to Ralph Engelman, "Origins of Public Access Cable Television," 1966-1972, it was during this time that Public Access Television in New York was conceived in 1968 by Fred Friendly, when he was assigned chairman of Mayor John Lindsay's Advisory Task Force on CATV and Telecommunications, and he wrote a report recommending that cable companies set aside two channels the public could lease for a minor fee. Later he held the post of Edward R. Murrow Professor of Broadcast Journalism at Columbia University. He played a major role in establishing the PBS network. The broadcast newsroom at Columbia University's School of Journalism is named for Friendly, as is a professorship at the school.

He was the author of several books, including The Good Guys, The Bad Guys and The First Amendment (an account of a number of first amendment court cases and particularly of the "Fairness doctrine"), Minnesota rag (A history of Near v. Minnesota), The Constitution: That Delicate Balance, The Present-minded professor, and Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control (about his 16 years at CBS).

In 2005 George Clooney portrayed Friendly in Good Night, and Good Luck., a film he also directed which depicts the See it Now broadcasts that confronted Senator McCarthy.